When Disavow first launched, many people felt like they were doing "Google's job." At first, I completely disagreed with that sentiment. I loved it. I needed disavow, and yes, Bing did get to it first! However, since Matt Cutts' announcement of Disavow at Pubcon to present day, I have started to change my tune a bit based on experiencing what I can only call disavow hell. I truly do understand Google's position on the tool, but I am thinking a lot of small business owners need more transparency, as they cannot battle what they are up against.
SEER recently took on a client for whom we have disavowed what feels like about 85% of their links. Their owner is an amazingly awesome woman whose business is getting hurt due to the efforts of her previous SEO firm. The firm left her business in a bad place. She was doing #RCS already, and had built a real business that helped people find solutions to the issues of her niche. She was doing content marketing and building assets that added value well before she employed an SEO firm. Instead of showing some discretion on their aggressive tactics, they slammed the gas and went full bore on the spam. Her business grew and she hired people, not knowing that her SEO firm was setting her up for failure.
At first, I was a big fan of disavow. Now that I am personally spending tons of time helping out on two clients affected negatively by the tool, I can't help but think...seriously, is the the best use of my time to help these clients succeed online? Instead of spending the same time strategizing on how to build assets that add value, I'm hunting down spammy link networks. Google, is this what you want me and the SEER Interactive team to be doing? After disavowing 5,800 domains and being declined again, I am starting to see this as a serious needle in a haystack. If it is a needle in a haystack for companies like SEER, can you imagine what it's like for the average small business owner?
Having submitted a few disavows and ending with them denied time and time again, I realized, man, this is a waste of time. However, we will keep at it because we'll never quit trying to help our clients succeed. Instead of the SEER team working on RCS and brainstorming on how to create valuable content that will add value (i.e. doing all the things Google says we should do), we are spending time trying to find link networks and things we don't know a ton about because we didn't build those crappy links to begin with.
We pitched a concept (to be shown at Mozcon, hopefully; buy your tickets now!) that got a client on several news stations (it was quite a rush seeing a SEER Idea on the 6:00 and 11:00 news, along with our CEO being interviewed), newspapers, and countless other sites, but we've minimized our work on it because our disavow requests for that client keep getting denied....you serious?? This is the best thing we've ever built, yet we are spending a portion of our time on disavow and trying to understand why one or two links somewhere is the tipping point over what we already disavowed. So we went nuclear, disavowing every link before SEER started with a DA under a certain level, that is not on blogspot.com style subdomains. Are we throwing out some of the good with the bad? Yup. But we want to get back to adding value and building things we can be proud of.
Google is giving spammers more business with disavow, not less
There are good people out there who are worried about their businesses, not just their rankings. These people will try to do what’s right to get back in Google's good graces, so they'll pay people to help them save their businesses. I know I would. Once they've decided to reach out for help, who are they going to go to? Probably the same types of people who built their crap link networks in the first place. Who knows how to remove spam links best, a spammer or a marketing agency?
Once again, the spammers get rewarded. Those who spammed the Internet spent their hours not creating value, but trying to create patterns in low-quality sites that Google wouldn't pick up on. It worked for years, and then suddenly, it didn't work anymore. Now the same people who created all the spam are the same ones these companies are relying on to find the patterns on how Google does it, since the companies who didn't do this stuff never spent their time architecting crappy links.
Disavow was needed. For the business owner in this example, she called and asked what's up the minute she realized these guys had hurt her business more than they helped. She had to spend countless hours away from building quality content and trying to grow her business in order to learn about link networks, and when she said, "Hey, can you guys remove these links you got?" her old firm charged her $12,000. If she declined to pay the price tag, they were holding her site ransom. If she agreed to the payment, she would be out 12k for link removal.
Ultimately, our business owner paid the fee. Two weeks later, disavow was announced, and - guess what - the old firm didn't remove even close to all the links. So again, I get the need for Disavow, but man, it also gets my team completely off what I'd like them to do. More importantly, it distracts my team from what Google would like them to do. Their time is taken away from building things that add value, and spent on figuring out how spam on the web used to work. This is definitely a skill I'd rather not be investing in, since we all know the shelf life of that skill is pretty limited.
Maybe someday Google will use Webmaster Tools as an understanding when a client moves to a new agency, consultant, etc. I'm not convinced that is the right solution, but I guess we need to start somewhere to figure out how we get away from spending time on spam. If you are building spam links (which would make you a spammer) or if you are spending time understanding spam to make disavow work (which is everyone else), it's a bad use of time for everyone.
Here are three big takeaways from what I've seen with my limited Disavow work:
1. Cut the bleeding, hardcore
This is the wrong time to get nitpicky about Disavowing links, especially if you have switched firms and 90% of what the old firm did was spam. Simply go into Webmaster Tools, pull the link report (with dates), and start Disavowing everything before the old firm started that has a low domain authority. It surprises me at how often people get picky.
I’d say you are better off over-Disavowing the links, and then go back when you have time and are out of the penalty to pick back out the ones you think you may have been too aggressive on. It's not a perfect solution, but this way, you get out of the penalty sooner rather than later.
2. Don't cry wolf (too much)
I have no proof of this, but I can only imagine that if you keep nibbling off one link at a time and submitting Disavows, Google may begin to get sick of it and might stop reviewing your requests as frequently.
I also remember that, when Disavow launched, the Google team was a bit worried that people would disavow the good links along with the bad. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you Disavow quality links, Google has ways of saying "you probably made a mistake and didn't mean that," especially when they compare the good links to their expansive list of bad links, link networks, etc.
3. Go do some real marketing!!!
You want rankings? You can't just stop doing the bad; you have to start doing the good! Put priority on doing the things Google wanted you to do all along. Reference the high quality stuff you've done in your re-consideration requests, and let Google know you are making real investments and turning over a new leaf.
So often when we talk about disavowing links, clients go…OMG well I’m going to lose some of my rankings… well, RIGHT BUDDY! When your rankings are propped up on fake marketing tactics and you haven’t done enough #RCS, then you are stuck with never having built real assets that attract real links. For the future of your business, you gotta start somewhere, and if your business isn't worth marketing in some way other than SEO, then you are probably the exact kind of site that Google doesn't want to rank well in most verticals.
Hi Wil, I'm a fan of yours, but I have to say that I feel like you're missing something here in this post. Perhaps you have done what I write about below, but you didn't mention it so I felt the need to comment. You said, "Having submitted a few disavows and ending with them denied time and time again, I realized, man, this is a waste of time." Google doesn't deny or accept a disavow request...it's the reconsideration request that gets accepted or denied.
You didn't mention what you are doing to get these bad links made by a previous SEO company removed. The documentation for the disavow tool states, "If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site."
It really is unfortunate when a business owner suffers because of the work that an SEO company has done on their behalf. I'm working with a site right now that has had thousands of links built using some type of SENuke or Xrumer blasts and contacting webmasters is going to be darn near impossible. Yet, I'm still doing the work. I'm also working at contacting the hosts of these sites to let them know about the spam that is on their servers to see if we can get some of it taken down. Am I nuts for doing this when the chances of success are pretty small? No. The reason why I say this is that Google wants to see effort that we have tried our best to rid the web of the spam that was caused as a result of someone trying to get our site to rank higher. I will put a case together just like a court case and show Google evidence of al of my efforts to clean the mess up. I will submit this evidence in the form of a reconsideration request. The disavow file is there as a part of my request, but is not the request itself.
If Google allowed a site to escape a penalty simply by disavowing their links, then any spammer could just build thousands of links to their site and then when penalized disavow them and start all over again.
My question seems rather novice but I have no one to ask...I have been link building for 3 years on various projects and never once received a webmaster warning. Does this mean I have nothing to worry about or is there some other means of being notified of bad links?
Responses are appreciated.
Technically you don't need to be worry but just be aware that you never get involve in any unethical link generation process. We always need ask ourselves is my practise is really valuable.
Some questions will help you.
1) Is i am contributing some valuable stuff?
2) Is I am generating useful content?
3) What is the kind of audience website have? Is they are reasder, infoseekers, or just a marketers who just gather to snap links.
4) How much social is the website actually is with whom i am contributing?
5) Is the website follow the Google Link Standards? Or do they have paid links?
For more fabulous tips I recommend you to watch the 2012 best White Board Friday - The Death of Link Building and the Rebirth of Link Earning - By Rand Fishkin
I don't know that anyone can answer that without seeing your link profile. If you are building links using easy to get methods like low quality articles and directories, bookmarks and the like then yes, you can end up being penalized. The warnings that webmasters get are as a result of someone from Google manually evaluating their site. There are many sites out there that have manipulative link profiles and don't have a warning simply because they haven't been caught. This is similar to people who get caught for speeding while others get away with it.
You may be interested in this article: The difference between Penguin and an unnatural links warning.
I don't think anyone can rightfully flat-out tell you that you have nothing to worry about just because you haven't received a warning from Google. One of my client's, who had a bunch of old, spammy links, was penalized by Penguin and completely removed from Google's index, and they received no warning whatsoever. We just woke up the morning of 4/16 (or whenever it was?) and the site was gone. Matt Cutts just recently released a blog post that said the next version on Penguin is in the works.
It's like the other comments say--what does your link profile look like?
Hey Marie, you know what I meant :) Got it spot on. Thanks for clearing that up, as I could see people being like...Wil's got some inside game where he submits disavows :)
I also do all the contacting and all that stuff, we even for one client pasted email headers in a Google doc, so Google could see that we were sending out these emails and trying to get rid of the crap, we went that far!
I like how you ended your comment, as its is exactly where I am, what is the balance? Google is now rewarding me for spam fighting, which we will do, but it surely is not the place I'd like to be spending my time. I guess we also are different in that we don't take on many penalized clients, since most were taking big time shortcuts, but its the few we believe in, and take on are the most painful ones.
Thanks Wil. I figured you were also manually trying to get links removed and not just disavowing. :)
I'm in the opposite boat as you...I don't take on many linkbuilding clients but almost all of my time is spent working with clients who have a penalty. I think it's ridiculous that Google requires so much work to be done to get a penalty lifted. It would make much more sense to have me spending my time building awesome stuff and promoting it than spending all day trying to get links removed.
Wil, I would love to have a look at your client's failed reconsideration requests and see if I can figure out why Google is not lifting the penalty. I'm really a nobody in the SEO world but I'm pretty good at solving these difficult cases. I just had a penalty revoked today for a site with horrible blackhat links and several failed reconsideration requests.
I think if there is very small amount of bad links then I'll surely try to remove by contacting web masters, but if there is thousands of backlinks then I would surely use disavow (specifying a comments in file) OR start a new domain (if that domain name is not extremely important for a company) and divert my efforts doing something more useful.
Hey Marie, can you show me an example of reconsideration request note that you would send to Google Spam team? That would really help a lot.
Sure. Here is an example that I posted on Search Engine Watch a while back: https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2262933/Google-Reconsideration-Request-Guidelines-Example
Thanks for the link, Marie. Great article by the way :)
I learn only one thing by this tool OR update. It's inspiring me to check website value before drop my link over there. And, Why should we not focus to balance link value rather than cut down existing links? I am more in favor to develop quality links to recover negative effect. I think Go do some real marketing!!! paragraph is explaining similar concept.
Anand, you're absolutely right with "Why should we not focus to balance link value rather than cut down existing links?" Firstly, I do exactly "balancing" works on my way to prevent any spam or negative SEO on my websites...
Andrew, Honestly yes... I always try to focus on building quality one... rather than focus in past and bad link which developed or purchased due to certain situation...
You have not seen DA drops thanks to a good few of those bad links suddenly popping up at once or being discovered at once, you will not be able to properly keep up with "balancing" it out since you cannot build 50 or 100 links white hat and organic, yet overnight or even over a month. That is something Google can easily get suspicious about and further give you hassle for. End result, you "fall behind" in your balancing, meaning, you incur damage to "recover from" in the form of dropped DA or other devalued/diluted factors.
This happened in front of my eyes when our client went ahead with a paid link acquisition despite our most stern warnings. dropped DA of 32 that took us 4 months to reach from 28, right down to 21 or something near that. I would not EVER, try to balance anything like this out and so shouldn't anyone else waste people's money for month or two months of work to recover from a nasty situation like this when a 2 hour session of link analysis and disavowing can fix the problem and "contain the damage" much more efficiently.
I think it depends on whether the penalty is due to a % of bad links as compared to the rest of the link profile, or if it's certain links in particular that need to be removed.
@Anand Mistry: I have little bit conflictions with your point, that is build link from good external resource that is fine but if your website is getting hit by penguin then you need to work on link removal otherwise you website will never recover. And if you made bad links then you need to work on to link removal also that could also harm for your website if it is recognize by search engine.
I believe that we need to follow Ryan Kent suggestions on https://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links
and Marie Haynes on https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too That are amazing i am sure you will get more stuff which will be very help full.
Thx
Very well said Anand. Because at the end quality link is the matter with link building and organic ranking and off course quality content is there.
Its all about stop building links and start earning them naturally for the quality, creative work done. These links earned negates the impact of negative backlinks in an organic way. SEO post Google penguin and panda algorithm updates is all about content. Content marketing is the art which every site owner needs to master. It helps a business online in creating brand awareness, building trust/credibility in the niche, building a community of consistent and new visitors etc.
In my opinion Google is hurting the wrong people here.
Penalise the companies building the links, not the site the links point to.
A lot of GOOD companies have enlisted the services of SEO companies in good faith, these same SEO companies were chosen because of the results they were achieving... results achieved by building crappy links and gaming Google.
Google presented SEO companies the opportunity to make lots of money by cheating the system, then decide to get tough, but instead of penalising the SEO company, they penalise the website owner.
Personally I am sick of seeing questionable SEO companies walking away from Penguin/Panda virtually scott free, yet the companies who paid in good faith for their services are suffering the wrath of Google.
Justin, when you coming to the #searchchurch? Cause you are PREACHING to the choir. I am watching mid/small businesses getting hit and tehir old SEO's just change their business cards to say "inbound marketing" expert and they are back open for business. Even seen it happen to a company a lot of us on here know. They spammed for a client, client didn't know, client got hit, company is still selling and the client is left with a pile of poo to clean up.
Amen to that!
Hopefully the day of reckoning will come for these less than scrupulous companies... but I have my doubts
"A lot of GOOD companies have enlisted the services of SEO companies in good faith,"
To my mind, that is no excuse. These companies also benefited from the black hat SEO for a time and never learned what they needed to succeed online
Things like Penguin and Panda are the natural selection that removes many people who thought building web businesses is easy and who feel entitled to succeed without understanding the web
Would you have any sympathy for someone who opened a restaurant without knowing how to cook?
S
That's a good perspective. I sit somewhere in the middle. I have picked up clients, small businesses that paid for something that worked and assumed it must be okay - mom & dad businesses, plumbers, busy people who just believed what they were paying for was good honest web marketing.
That said, for everyone of these folks there is another mom & pop company struggling to make ends meet as they are being frozen out by people who are spamming whether they know it or not.
Tricky situation, no clear right or wrong, lots of moving parts, yada yada.
Ultimately, this is not a perfect solution, but I see no other way than just pulling the plaster off (band aid for the US folks) and dealing with the pain.
In my experience with disavowing for people, nearly everyone wants to hold on to links that they think are helping and you just have to be utterly brutal.
Ultimately, it is what it is, don't put all your eggs in the Google search basket and try to do much of your web marketing with a mindset that search engines don't exist.
Interesting points Stephen, although I'm not sure I agree.
If you hire a builder, is it your responsibility to understand building code?
I would suggest that small companies should be concentrating on what they set up in business to do, they then employ the services of specialists to cover the areas of knowledge or expertise they do not have in house.
Is employing a SEO company any different to employing an ad agency?... probably not. The difference being if you don't like you ad agency, you fire them and move on, its not so easy to move on with a link penalty holding you back.
I wish I could thumb this comment up ten times. This entails so much of the beef I have with Google. And this post made me realize yet another way the wrong people are being punished.
Will
I am glad it is a pain to clean up links and that people now have to pay dearly for their indiscretions
The only reason people are taking Penguin seriously at all is because of the massive pain in the ass it is to clean up a backlink profile
If there was no downside to spamming, then no one would do anything else
S
Besides, if spam wasn't harder to make work, then how could you make money promoting RCS? ;)
Couldn't agree more Stephen.
This isn't Google being belligerent - they're saying to the industry collectively "you broke it... you fix it!"
Stephen actually those are some GREAT points! I kind of wish Google has an MCC for SEOs, so they can see when a company comes into SEER's master account of projects we are working on...not to say that should clear penalties, but to say...the client is under new management, so keep an eye out. Now that I think about it, they have access to that already just don't think they are using it.
All in all you are right, if there wasn't enough pain people wouldn't change their ways, and I guess some people will just get hit in the meantime who are innocents.
Disavowing the links would give an hint to search engine that you've been involved in manipulation in past and now as Algorithm has changed you're taking one step back to jump high again.
Though with this if you recovered, still you'll always been under shadow of questionable site.
What you suggest is not necessarily the case because of negative SEO. Competitors or anyone with a grudge against you could point spammy links to your site in an effort to bring you down via a Penguin style attack.
Google knows this and I am sure that they are not blindly assuming that if you have spammy links your site is questionable. That is too simplistic.
The fact that you use the disavow tool (especially after receiving a notice) indicates that you take this seriously and is a signal that you want to comply with Google guidelines. Therefore, I doubt that you carry some permanent "shadow" of suspicion due to a first time offense.
Disavow is like confessing a crime... and I don't think you should confess, except you're caught ;) .
If you have got an unnatural link notice in GWT then doubtlessly it's important to use Disavow Tool, but having very small ratio of bad links (probably built by competitors) should not be Disavow because Google can understand that sometime nature backlinks are also bad.
I think, instead of disavowing the small ration of bad links you should built more high quality of backlinks to decrease ratio of bad links.
Google already knows you've been involved in manipulation if you get an unnatural link notice, so I don't think it makes any difference in terms of 'their view' of your business. Also for a manual penalty to be lifted, you most likely have to submit a reconsideration request. Simply cleaning up ad waiting for the next update may turn into a long waiting game...
What!? I have to do real marketing?! :) Haha, if you haven't been doing real marketing you should start because your going to be left in the dust. Thanks for the good read.
Google should not hold a website owner accountable for other companies creating links to their site. Why is it my job to clean up the internet? If I spammer links to my site, that is not in my control. Google should police inbound links by requiring all inbound juice to only come from sites registered in google webmaster tools. They could then keep a watchful eye in many ways.
Google isn't that stupid, but I bet they are looking for when you started changing pages on site to include keywords in titles, content, etc and then timing when the low quality links start coming in as just one way that they might prevent that. Since you control your site's content (for the most part), its one way to hurt ya and increase the likelihood it was you, vs someone else.
Depending on the amount of SPAM that's about what you need to get the job done right. We have had Google come back a few times and basically say: "Good work, but there is still a lot of SPAM pointing to your site." You have to be meticulous about every single link, esp. site-wide links.
We have also had clients say, "You're not removing all of our links, we still rank well and we don’t want to lose that juice!” Even sitting under a HUGE manual penalty. That’s like owning the worst team in major league baseball and not even showing up the draft.
Negative SEO and link disavow is a nasty subject, but I think you have to look at it from Google's perspective.
Their priority is their users, they don't care about small mum and pop businesses, and they generally try to automate their entire Search business with algorithms and signals.
People that are forced to use the disavow tool like you suggested above probably make up like 0.001% of web masters on the internet. From a financial and PR point of view, it makes no sense for Google to bother looking into how to help these people. They make their money from big brands, PPC and advertising, not from helping small webmasters. The onus is on webmasters, not Google, to fix their businesses. Furthermore, I think in an ideal world Google doesn't want anyone relying on them for traffic, regardless of if you do white hat SEO.
<RantOver/>
The easiest thing to do in my opinion is tell the client to switch domains (hopefully she could go from something like KatesBathrooms.com to KatesBathrooms.net). Rather then manually disavowing/removing links, you can just find the high quality ones and ask them to be moved to the new domain.
I personally recommended this strategy with my own client, who moved from a .com to a .co.uk domain. They are now doing extremely well and we moved over the high quality links from the .com domain.
it should be <rant>write here</rant> for it to work!
I love how people always thumb down suggestions like this but never post examples of their own recoveries. Most of the time It's not worth a mom and pop's money to pay a pro to remove the links. They can move everything to a new domain for under $200.
I am doing what you sugest and start recovering rank with the new website.
As i write a good content , but it is a lot moré difficuld to rank my new domain as the authority of the banned one was very strong versus a no authority domain.
I keep get notices from Google that bad links still on older domain. I will made a last effort. It has been one year .
You think it is bad if i link the banned domain to the new one to pass authority ?
I agree with making a new domain is the best option for many small businesses but Google will definitely have incentive to search for a more viable solution than to severely penalize questionable links. It encourages negative seo attacks and I'd imagine would become more rampant. There is no way this would produce the type of search results they want.
That's the way it is now. You can buy a $5 gig on Fiverr and cost your competitors thousands of dollars. It's a joke really.
Hey Wil,
Your post is exactly the reason why we're bringing Ryan Kent to the Search Church (and three other cities including Seattle) in July to deliver those workshops on link removal and lifting penalties.
The truth is, it's not easy work, but there's way more to it than firing up a gmail account and for those who've never played in the sewer, it can be hard to know where the stench is really coming from (sorry, stinky analogy :).
We see new deceptive behaviors every day at rmoov (not just from spammers, but webmasters and registrars too) and we are constantly adding new features to deal with them.
The one thing that stands out for me in the little bit of process you talked about here is a fundamental that might have resulted in two wrong turns that could be at the heart of your problem...
"Simply go into Webmaster Tools, pull the link report (with dates), and start Disavowing everything before the old firm started that has a low domain authority"
1) Despite assertions from Googlers that you don't need any data but what is in Google Webmaster Tools, I have seen many cases where outrageous instances of clearly damaging links have not shown up there (more than 15,000 followed links with the same high value anchor text term from a single site where every URL included porn terms). I'm thinking you wouldn't want to have those pointing at your site even though they aren't delivered in a download from Google? Let's not forget also, that cleaning up "just enough" to get a manual action revoked is inviting another disaster at some time down the track (maybe even "within a few weeks")
2) Yes, there's a lot of crappy links out there from low authority domains, but wait a minute! How many people were clamoring to buy PR 0 or 1 links to improve their site?? Let's face it, those Authority metrics have been GAMED baby! Heck, I've seen a bucket load of sickeningly manipulative links on high PR sites ... even on some that would swear up and down it's not possible for that to happen on their site. If I were a spam killer at Google, I would be way more worried about an obviously manipulative link on a highly respected PR8 domain, than the same link on a PR0 :(
Also, if you're going to keep splashing around down here in the link removal world Mr Reynolds, We need to talk! - See you at Mozcon ;)
Sha
Good stuff as always Wil...
We've taken a fairly cautious approach to Disavow. We push REALLY hard on link removals first - hunting down the webmasters, and doing whatever we got to do to make it happen. It's easier for sites with lots of directory links or paid blogroll text links. It's near impossible for the spam blog networks like old Build My Rank types of sites, b/c no one really owns them and/or they purposely don't want to be found. I'm with you here, it's not fun and not how I'd like our team to be spending their time.
All of the information Google has put out about the Disavow Tool is super confusing. It's still not clear to me if the tool actually does cause Google to de-value those links for a given site in some automated way, or if it's just like a formal hand washing that you couple with a reinclusion request and as such the devaluation is more manual in nature. I certainly tend to think the latter, but then I'll find some video where they outline the timelines for processing the requests and when they "take effect", making it sound like the submission itself actually "does something" other than just supporting a reinclusion request.
The only saving grace here is that I believe we're still in this in-between time. I feel like a year from now we'll be talking about this sort of thing a lot less than we are now. Right now, Penguin is still relatively new and the change in link building tactics for the masses is still fairly recent, so there is still a lot of mess to clean up.
I've been very fortunate that I haven't had to use Disavow yet on my main property. We've been on the straight and narrow since our inception and it's held steady through all the major algo fluctuations.
But the same can't be said for one of the smaller properties I recently took over. It's a mess. It's interesting to hear the aggressive disavow argument, and then of course Matt Cutts said the thing recently about cutting with a machete instead of a scalpal or whatever. Until this week I just didn't really know where to begin and it seemed like such a tedious task to go line by line by line when I know that there's a steady period of time that the prior marketers were buying garbage links. This makes more sense to me. I know it's 90% garbage and I'd be better off doing a wide net disavow and focusing all my energy on building up great content and links this site deserves.
Looking forward to seeing you again at MozCon.
Heather, thanks so much for your response, hope my piece was somewhat helpful, see you at Mozcon.
Negative SEO looks like it is picking up steam in forums. Is this because SEO's have noticed an increase in clients requesting help?
Well, yes negative seo, combined with our own previously gung-ho approach to acquiring links meant that our site tanked, badly. The rival company who did it, we know exactly who, was very clever about it, and I couldnt directly prove it was them, plus google did nothing about it either. Upon doing a fresh link audit, i think it may have happened again, although to a lesser extent. All i want to do is to write good content, what google wants, but no, I'm rattling around in the back of the site, wondering what the heck is going on!
Yes, everybody's talking about it, but to be honest, there are an awful lot of people out there jumping to the Negative SEO conclusion when what they are actually seeing is something completely different.
The vast majority of "Negative SEO Attack"s I see have actually been the result of poorly configured Wordpress sites that have been hacked or genuinely stupid and lazy niche raiders creating duplicated blog networks filled with a site owner's own poor content, lifted from article directory sites long ago forgotten.
It certainly doesn't make them any less damaging, but it also doesn't make them Negative SEO :(
Sha
So what is the bottom line - Shouldn't I be proactive in in case I see many spammy links, shouldn't I disavow them?(regardless the fact the my site doesn't have any manual penalty).
I wouldn't spend too much time on this, if you don't have a warning.
The question is - should I wait to get a warning or should I be proactive?
Great post, Wil as always. I agree with you that the Link Removal tool/process seems to be doing more harm than good. For a lot of us it's just a simple kid tattle telling, but not really telling us what the true problem is.
I am only just learning about seo and google ranking and all of the rest of it and I completely agree, it does seem a bit like google rewards poor links and ignores actual content. It's been a running joke with everyone I know that google gives ridiculous results (i.e. when searching for twinkies a friend of mine had thousands of results for "twinks" pop up instead, how on earth do 'quality content links' give those results!?!).
If you are just starting out, ignore this. Just focus on doing the right things, until you get a warning for un-natural links, keep doing quality work to promote your business.
We have recently disavowed some of the Backlinks from various sites not pertaining to website development, which has been the niche of our business. We do admit the quality of work done by the seo company, but it was necessary as to abide by the recent Google penguin update, and the effect is noticed how webmasters view the step taken. To avoid negative marking by the Google itself, why not take an extra effort to remove some of the bad links. The glass is half full or half empty means the same. Thus removing the bad links or constructing more good links means same to me. Also i feel we should be less interested in really knowing more about the scenario of the company whose link poses a bad link for our website, rather individually we should be concentrating to our business and abide by the updates made by Google, and continue the process of dusting our website.
Tanmay Ghatak
https://www.iadroit.com
I would suggest to definitely keep watch on your backlinks, mostly the new ones you have made, if you aren't already. Also, find a time to disavowing those poor quality or suspicious backlinks before it can have any impact on your site.
DT is dangerous but it always possible to delete domain from list and upload again. Bigger problem is how to select only bad links.
What scares me about a lot of the posts on Moz lately is the talk about bad linkbuilding. It really worries me in terms of Negative SEO. I personally think google/big names are worried about bad backlinks too much now. Instead of penalizing sites and making life harder the advanced algo they have been working on should just ignore these toxic links.
Everyone who read this article should also know that word is google suggests using the disavow tool like a "machete"
Thank you so much for sharing your experience!
You are right! Although Disavow are meant to be a useful tool for white hat SEO, it is so easy to be misused. It’s also a great distractions from what we should be doing, creating contents that add values. Very good point!
It’s also interesting how you pointed out that Google would stop reviewing one’s requests as frequently if they “over-Disavowing” links. It’s no different than trying to bust a bad guy while the judge keeps telling you to be quiet. Very frustrated. So I’m just curious if you would have any suggestion for Google to distinguish between good and bad Disavow requests?
Anyway, good luck on your pitch for Mozcon!
Trang Lam
I'll never try to use disavow tool again.
The benefit is unseen.
Despite, I'll remove by hand all the bandlinks.
I had some bad links on a website. So, i decided to try the disavow link tool from Google last week and now, my website grow up. It win 2 pages. It's a great tool but use it with prudence.
Thankfully this isn't something I've had to use yet, but it is something that worries me and I dread the day when I get a site with a bad link network.
I share everyone's frustration with small businesses that get torched by fly by night SEO companies that just change their business cards as Wil stated. I've been called a spammer at a party before just because I do SEO. The problem in this industry is client education. Small businesses are responsible for the SEO they hire in the same way in which someone who hires a bad accountant is still accountable to the IRS. I applaud the efforts of SEO's that do everything that they can and fight for their clients using transparency and honesty. Thanks for your insight Wil on this tool. We've yet to use it, but I feel a bit more prepared when we do.
I agree that I dont think the disavow tool is that great. I think Google had to do something within their timeline of Penguin and Panda updates for the normal business owner to figure out a way to clean up their site. Manually removing links is a very costly, time consuming effort that the normal business owner cannot do. However, I think there are a lot of people that are jumping into the Disavow bandwagon before realizing this is not the best way to come out of a manual penalty.
We have taken sites with huge manual penalties and brought them back to life. Here is some background & what has worked for us.
#1 Using Google's disavow tool is not a way to get out of a penalty on it's own. Even if you are not responsible for SPAM heading to your website, you are responsible in Google's eyes for cleaning it up. Is this a waste of time - Maybe? However, what is more important, coming out of a manual link penalty OR sitting in the dust on page 6? That’s a business question.
#2 The Disavow tool will not help you come out of an update like Penguin or Panda, even if you think it will.
#3 Transparency to Google. EVERY SINGLE TIME we submit a re-consideration request to Google, we provide as much detail into how we went about killing the SPAM on our own. The only point that we use or point out the Disavow work is after we have e-mailed, called, and done everything in our power to have a link removed and can't get it down (usually foreign websites). This sucks big-time, but guess what - losing traffic sucks worse. Be sure to use Google Doc's and make your spreadsheets public to show - Links Removed & Links Disavowed. We have had to remove thousands of links by hand for this to work with some clients. I look at it this way, if a member of the SPAM team at Google is taking the time to review your site, and all you did was throw a bunch of SPAM links in a spreadsheet and cry "MY OLD SEO WAS SPAMMING", why do they give a sh*t? Fix it.
#4 This is not all bleak information. If you have a real brand and a real website, and you have been down the black road of SPAM it's not the end of the road. However, if your website is just another cunning attempt at doing the same thing everyone else is doing, without providing anything meaningful for users, you're wasting your time. Always ask yourself this question - "Would I be happy if I found my website #1 for this keyword, and is it the best resource for this subject matter".
Happy Trails, our usual timeline for a reconsideration request is 60-90 days before even making the request. It usually takes about a month for Google to get back to you.
60-90 days? Thanks for sharing that with us. Good point you raise here, which is don't just run off submitting the disavow. I kind of mentioned that in my comment to Jared below, but I didn't put a time frame on it, but I think we are saying the same thing. Without showing Google that you are trying to get links removed but also add value, you don't have much of a leg to stand on, why would Google care about letting you back in?
I bet you after the penalization these link networks just got again - are crying some serious wolf.
your pal,
Chenzo
I would avoid Disavow as much as possible and try alternatives first -
1. Focus on real marketing efforts that gets me quality links.
2. Simultaneously clean up as much shit as possible.
And make sure both, acquiring and removal of links happen at a pace that looks Natural to the search engines.
- KAS
In an ideal world, Google wants us to build quality content. Pages that can be trusted and actually add value to the world wide web as a whole.
While organic search is awesome, I don't think this is the ultimate solution specially for people who want to drive traffic to their site.
Stand out and build a following, when people trust your brand it won't matter much if you actually rank or not.
nice article, i like it
good article and answered many of my queries, however one thing: If you have already disavowed links, google (i think) encourages you to "police" your link profile and update it from time to time? (eg when a bad site scrapes your content). When the new updated list is re uploaded to google, does the whole process start again? Do the links previously disavowed, change back to un-ignored whilst waiting for it to be disavowed again? ok what i mean is, say i submit a disavow on January 1st.
Maybe 6 weeks later (?) it comes into effect? Then April 1st, i find some people have scraped our content, so i have bad links, thru no fault of my own. So i add these to the disavow list, and re upload. Does that take a FURTHER 6 weeks or so or not? The reason i ask is that one of my main money sites dropped rankings last week quite dramatically, despite the fact we have made no changes to the site (I would like to post the link but not sure if that is against the rules?), so we thought, ok it must be a link issue (we were link bombed a year ago by a rival but cannot prove it, despite knowing exactly who did it.). Any ideas?
Alexander, this is a VERY smart insight buddy, something I didn't even consider, but someone (who I forget now, sorry can't shout you out) was telling me, dude you might want to go check out the new links monthly and make sure you keep disavowing the crap.
I think that is a VERY important step. Great point.
Hi wilreynolds
Thanks for writing about disavow, I'd like to ask you a question, I've used disavow tool and its almost 2 months back when I submit the file in disavow tool but after that I didn't file reconsideration request,
So my question is that is it necessary to file re-consider request after using disavow tool?
Because I can still see those same count of links in webmasters and no effect in SERP
Looking forward
Great question, I am admittedly pretty weak on disavow rules, as I always submit a re-consideration request after the disavow, but I've only taken on 3 clients where we have had to use it.
Ironic how the spam site owners, that charged for link placement are double dipping and charging for link removal.
So far we've been fortunate enough to not have to use the disavow tool for any current clients. However, I've always been of the opinion that (as you mentioned in #3) a major marketing push is needed right away for sites that have been diagnosed with Penguin.
Would you put this in any particular order Wil? ie, disavow first, hardcore marketing push first, or just as quickly and organized as possible?
Jared, how are you buddy? Have you been avoiding clients who come to you with penalties? We avoided it for most of our clients (1 or 2 added some extra link building and never told us, thanks guys).
I say do a hardcore marketing push, and here is why, when you are taking over for a new client, its critical that you show google in your reconsideration request that you have turned over a new leaf. For instance one of our clients in disavow hell, have never done any real marketing, so when they got hit, there was nothing to point to, to say "hey google, penalty or not - we are trying to do some quality stuff here, and it is getting links from newspapers and news stations. I think that is the key, if you build "great content" but it gets no social or link signals, you can't really tell Google you are building stuff that adds value.
Definitely been avoiding them, although it's a little easier to steer clear when you're just starting out with a fresh client list (I've started a new agency since we last saw each other). The last agency I worked for though had sites that were hit with Penguin, and yes, it was a nightmare.
I had a similar experience recently. A client opted for a paid YP listing without our knowledge, and ended up stumbling our citation effort. The NAP was wrong and that got sent out several other citation sources :(
Good to have the second opinion on the marketing push. I think there's simply too many moving parts to the algos to know what's really going on under the hood, so why guess? Real stuff = real benefits.
I came across this last night from Matt Cutts' blog:
Matt Cutts May 13, 2013 at 9:53 am "Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links."
Translation: Disavow almost everything, file a reconsideration, and be done with it.
Read/watch more:
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/
These post is lethal but fabulous. Actually Disavow is the tool which is can be use as weapon in a kind of scenario when our websites get attacked by some Ethical spammers :) (The kind of team whole hate to do things which Google appreciates).
But Will you really raised a very interesting question over here how some one can recognize good links into the many bad ones. Specially in the kind of environment where we all define Good Links as per their relevancy, DA, PR.
As a professional and with a giant experience in search industry. You know that PR and DA is a kind of metrics represents the value which is appreciated by robots and also defines it reputation and authority of website but we cannot relay upon them 100%.
Here I want ask a thing by describing an example.
How much we should depend on DA and PR?
Will let's take a example as now days Guest Blogging and Content marketing is the Hotspot of industry. Many of the valuable websites with good DA started accepting low quality content. Isn't it is risky to have links from such domains as they begin compromising with the quality to boost income. Today those website have good DA but they will not always maintain that DA and PR as they will not gain good valuable references in future. Their are the chances Google will attack them too.
Instead of it we should focus on the websites who don't have good DA and PR but they are contributing some real value in the industry as these practise will obviously create them brand one day. SEOMOZ is the perfect example for such scenario.
Is relevancy really that important?
Let's suppose I build really creative website and i got mentions in many forums or community of designers and developers. Now my website has been appreciated but with irrelevant reasons so should I consider those links good for me or should I Disavow them.
I really get so much confused with these two questions when in need Disavow links for my websites. Guide me please.
Thanks :)